I once heard the distinguished and delightfully reticent novelist, V. S. Naipaul, pronounce – in answer to a television interviewer who had asked what was the most important quality a novelist needed – the one word ‘Luck’. I think he was right. Certainly, it was my immense luck that the man who entered my head that day as I sat in my armchair proved to be a person with enough of myself in him to be able to turn this way and that, confronted by new aspects of life, and find new things in himself to match up to them.
So, in 1967 it was Inspector Ghote Caught in Meshes, when he looked at life as a tugging of different loyalties and became involved for the first and only time in something approaching the espionage novel. In 1968 it was Inspector Ghote Hunts the Peacock, where he came to London and discovered not only who had murdered a distant relation of his wife, a young woman known as ‘the Peacock’, but also the pluses and minuses that go with a sense of pride (Pride = peacock. Geddit?).
It was in the course of this book that I hit on a nasty little snag which I had in my innocence – or indeed sheer ignorance – created for myself. Needing a name for the wife I found that Ghote had, or had to have, while writing The Perfect Murder, I had chosen at random the pretty ‘Protima’. Only to be told later by one of the kindly readers who send me what I call ‘But’ letters – Dear Mr Keating, I much enjoyed … But I must point out an error … – that Protima is a Bengali name. So in Hunts the Peacock I boldly stated that Maharashtrian Ghote had, unusually, married a Bengali.
It was twenty years later, while I was writing the script for the film of The Perfect Murder with the director, Zafar Hai, that I learnt there is in fact a Maharashtrian version of the name, Pratima. So in the film Ghote’s wife is a Maharashtrian, as different from a Bengali as Spaniard from German, and is deliciously played as such by Ratna Pathak, the wife of Naseeruddin Shah, our star. So is the film-Ghote not the book-Ghote? Knotty philosophical point. Certainly, in Naseer Shah’s performance he is very much the Ghote I had in mind. Or perhaps the Ghote I had inside, because Naseer said once that he had been given the clue to the man by looking in the eyes of his creator.
But there is a complication, or even two: a radio-Ghote and a TV-Ghote. In 1972 I was asked (I think) to write a radio play about Ghote and produced Inspector Ghote and the All-Bad Man, followed by Inspector Ghote Makes A Journey and Inspector Ghote and the River Man. Feeling with the latter that I could not see the situation sufficiently without being able to describe its setting as well as entering into Ghote’s head, I began to write in narrative form before making it into radio dialogue. That torso tale, completed, is one of the stories here. In the second play I had Ghote coming to London a second time, as a planted stowaway among a party of illegal immigrants; and in a television play I wrote in 1983 (a semi-pilot for an abortive series), Ghote came to London yet again as a paying guest in the home of an ancient British Raj couple.
There was, too, an earlier television appearance in a version of Hunts the Peacock written by the Irish playwright, Hugh Leonard (who kept Ghote mercifully as he is in the book), with my hero acted by Zia Moyheddin. (Incidentally, he gave Ghote a moustache, which he just has in Inspector Ghote Goes By Train, but which he has never had at all by the time of the following books.) Now did he, my Ghote, book-Ghote, come to London more than once? His other visits certainly do not seem to be in my mind when I embark on the business – absurdly daring if you let yourself think about it – of holding in my head that whole different world in which there is a person called Ghote who has a wife called Protima, perhaps Pratima, and a son called Ved.
Here again we are back to complications. How old is Ved? Seen first in The Perfect Murder, he was big enough to sleep in a bed. When filming the scene in which Protima accuses Ghote of leaving her to cope on her own with a suddenly fever-ridden Ved – as an illustration to a BBC documentary about myself and the Bombay police – he appeared to be as old as ten or eleven (the only boy we could easily get hold of). But in the film of The Perfect Murder, because Naseer and Ratna Shah had a charming baby about a year old, Ved slid rapidly back to early infancy. Just one in 1988, but ten in 1974?
Whereas I can keep Ghote himself more or less stationary in age (though what exactly that age is depends, I suspect, as much on who is reading about him as on who writes about him) and I can keep his Protima ever elegant, ever her same self, a small boy must grow. So as the years pass my book-Ved gets bigger, though not by quite as much as the passing years dictate. If he did, his poor father would reach the early retirement age of the Indian Police Service much too soon for me, and the ore I mine so happily would abruptly prove exhausted.
It was shortly after Inspector Ghote Hunts the Peacock – to abandon the chronological complications – that I happened to write a short story called ‘The Justice Boy’ for a contest for British writers organised by that splendid American publication, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Set in an English prep school, it won the second prize, running-up to that Golden Age great Christianna Brand. As a consequence Fred Dannay, the other half of the pseudonymous Ellery Queen who then edited the magazine, wrote to me asking if I had any more stories.
So, in response, Ghote was set to begin a parallel life at shorter length and the story I eventually sent was the one that opens this volume, ‘The Test’. It illustrates the amount of Harry Keating that there is in Ganesh Ghote (although he had not in fact discovered his first name as early as this), because the incident in which the small Ved is overcome by horror when he thinks his father has vanished happened to me when I was much that age and my mother, not usually a practical joker, took it into her head to hide from me.
However, Ghote did not live any more of his life in short stories for a year or two after that first small, but quite characteristic, appearance. Instead there was Inspector Ghote Plays A Joker, in which he solved the murder of a rajah who, unlike my mother, was an inveterate practical joker. Hovering, as it were below the surface here, there were thoughts about games and games-playing in life.
Then there was Inspector Ghote Breaks An Egg, which took him out of Bombay to a small town in Maharashtra. This was one of the problems I faced: not to use and re-use the same setting, especially as my knowledge of never-visited Bombay was still confined to what I was able to discover about it from books, from the occasional Indian art-film featuring the city, from scraps of friends’ talk, from TV glimpses and from the pages of the Sunday edition of the Times of India, which I had begun to take. But in any case half my research went not outward, but inward. And there I discovered for my pages things about violence, the evil of violence and the good that sometimes cannot be brought about without it.
It was not until the end of 1971 – when I was asked by a friend, Desmond Albrow, then editing the Catholic Herald, to write a Christmas story for him – that short-story Ghote came to life again. The story, called variously ‘Inspector Ghote and the Miracle Baby’ or just ‘The Miracle’, is the second in the pages ahead. In it I incorporated – rather impudently, since I was writing for a religious paper – a quality I had had to give to Ghote which is not particularly characteristic of Indian police officers, or of most Indians. I made him an unbeliever. Since I had arrived at that state myself, I found I could not – seeing Ghote as I do from an angel-over-the-shoulder position – enter properly into his mind if it was to be filled with simple belief. Imagine, then, my dismay when at last I got to India three years later, met Bombay CID officers and saw almost invariably under the glass tops of their desks a picture of a god. Imagine, too, my slightly lesser dismay when I realised their desks had the glass tops necessary in a stickily humid climate, as Ghote’s had never had.
Short stories about Ghote were not exactly pouring from my pen, principally because there was hardly anywhere for them to be published. So he continued his life in books. In 1971 it had been Inspector Ghote Goes By Train, when I was able to make use of the mountain of Indian train lore I had accumulated – the extraordinary Indian railway system sets people a-writing and a-filming by the score – and send him (possibly moustached) all the way from Bombay to Calcutta and back, beset as ever with the difficulties that are a condition of his existence but triumphing finally, if not always to the complete satisfaction of his superiors.
Indeed in the next of his adventures, Inspector